In a relentless pursuit of tax cuts, Florida's leadership appears blind to or apathetic about the economic consequences, which we've only begun to feel.

Countless sermons have been preached, and innumerable lessons learned, from the biblical legend of an Egyptian king who asked an imprisoned slave named Joseph to interpret a troubling dream. He took to heart Joseph's warning of an impending crop failure and filled the regime's granaries while there was yet time.

If modern rulers don't rely on dreams -- at least not to any they would admit -- they do have the advantage of skilled economists, and increasingly sophisticated computer models, to forecast fiscal conditions fairly far ahead. Some of it is guesswork, of course, because if population growth is predictable far into the future, recession and inflation are not. Still, the experts can make conditional assumptions based on such hard facts as current tax and spending laws. The Congressional Budget Office regularly publishes and updates 10-year projections, and no one in Washington can propose to cut taxes or increase spending without accounting for the CBO's estimate of the effects. The CBO's famously reliable reports are frequently updated in print and on the agency's Web site.

But in Tallahassee, capital of the nation's fourth largest state, policymakers fly virtually blind. When Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature cut taxes three months ago, they knew only that they were giving back about $230-million a year in potential revenue. They did not know, nor did they seem even to want to know, what budget cuts might have to be imposed two, three or four years from now. During the mid-'90s, the Legislature's research arm published look-ahead balance sheets comparable to the CBO's, but that stopped without a peep of protest from the new Republican leadership.

What's more, the governor and Legislature didn't plan so well for even the current budget year. Tax collections are turning out to be poorer than economists were able to predict while the Legislature was in session, and Bush has begun holding back 1 percent of the money that lawmakers intended for the state to spend. Though the Democratic minority objects that it should be a collective decision involving the Cabinet, the fact is that someone has to do it. Florida's Constitution permits no deficit and forbids borrowing as an alternative. When there's less in the hand, there's less for the mouth. It's happened before.

The astonishing circumstance this time is that the governor and his allies in the House insisted on tax cuts, over Senate President John McKay's prudent objections, despite a Medicaid deficit that translated into no new state money for schools and in the face of unmistakable warning signs of an economic slowdown that would bite deeply and quickly -- as such events always do -- into Florida's consumption-based taxes. Weren't they listening? Or did they simply not care?

With the Democrats once again criticizing the tax cuts, Bush is protesting that he would be having to hold back money regardless. That's true, but beside the point. Whatever the result, it wouldn't have been so austere as it may become now.

And despite the growing economic uncertainty, and the fact that Washington will be taking back the federal estate tax credit, the Republican regime in Tallahassee is vowing tax cuts yet again next year. Come hell, high water or both, these ideologues are determined to get rid of the intangibles tax before Florida has a chance to be rid of them. As it happens, it's the only state tax keyed to wealth rather than to consumption.

It is time -- and what better time than an approaching election? -- for Floridians to think about the consequences. The problem is not so much that the regime doesn't care how deeply budgets must be cut -- its secret wish, after all, is to starve the beast -- but that it doesn't even know. This is not conservatism; It is madness.

No issue deserves more attention in the emerging governor's race than the public's right to know where their elected servants are leading them. Truth in budgeting will be the paramount plank of anyone who deserves their votes.

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